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Tag: neal katyal

Last week, I appeared on NPR’s Tell Me More program. My discussion with host Michel Martin gives a good synopsis of why ObamaCare is both harmful to consumers and unconstitutional. Listen to the segment here.

For a contrary perspective, listen to former Obama administration acting solicitor general Neal Katyal, who appeared on the program the next day. If you do listen to both programs, let me know what you think about Katyal’s comments, specifically this part:

MARTIN: First, I want to play a short clip from Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute who spoke to us yesterday as we said. This is a little of what he told us. Here it is.

MICHAEL CANNON: If the Supreme Court were to uphold this unprecedented and really breathtaking assertion of government power, there would be nothing to stop the Congress from forcing Americans to purchase any private product that Congress chose to favor. That could be a gym membership. That could be stock in Exxon Mobil. That could be broccoli if Congress decided that any of these products move in interstate commerce and that forcing you to buy it was essential to the regulatory scheme they wanted to enact.

MARTIN: What is your response to that?

KATYAL: Well, I mean, that’s a lot of rhetoric and not really a legal argument because it’s not responsive to what the government is asking for here. What the government is saying is, look, everyone consumes healthcare in this country, you and I. And, you know, even if I might say to myself, I don’t need health insurance. I won’t get sick. The fact is, as human beings with mortality, we are going to get sick and it’s unpredictable when.

You could get struck by a heart attack or cancer or hit by a bus and wind up in the emergency room and then it’s average Americans who have to pick up the tab for that. And so the government is not saying here we have the power to force people to buy goods. They’re saying, look, you’re going to already buy the goods. You’re going to use it. And the only question is, are you going to have the financing now to pay for it.

And so the government is regulating financing. It’s kind of like a government law that says you’ve got to pay cash or credit. It’s not the government coming in and saying, oh, consume this product you wouldn’t otherwise consume. And as for the kind of, you know, ludicrous suggestion that this would somehow lead to the government forcing people to eat broccoli or the like, I mean, I would think that someone from the Cato Institute would know that the Bill of Rights and the privacy protections in the constitution would protect against such drastic hypotheticals.

Now, I’ve been at this for a while. I’ve seen people evade uncomfortable questions and mischaracterize things I’ve said. But for some reason, this instance really surprised me. Maybe Katyal was nervous.

During Tuesday’s oral arguments in American Electric Power v. Connecticut—the global warming lawsuit that Walter Olson recently discussed here and Ilya Shapiro here, and in which Cato filed amicus briefs at both the certiorari stage and the merits stage—the justices concentrated their inquiries on a few technical legal doctrines in order to answer one question: should states even be allowed to sue power companies for the damage that global warming has allegedly done to their lands and citizens?

There are multiple ways this question could be answered, and how it is answered in the final opinion could have important ramifications for future environmental litigation.

Connecticut and five other states, plus New York City and three land trusts, brought the suit against five power companies. Their claim is based on the age-old tort of nuisance, the same ground that lets you sue your neighbor if his contaminated water seeps onto your land. Essentially, the states argued that if courts can solve that kind of dispute, then a dispute over global warming is only slightly different—bigger in scope, certainly, but not different in kind.

But at oral argument, the justices did not seem persuaded. Arguing against the states, Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal opened by pointing out that “[i]n the 222 years that this Court has been sitting, it has never heard a case with so many potential perpetrators and so many potential victims…[T]he very name of the alleged nuisance, ‘global warming,’ itself tells you much of what you need to know.” Chief Justice John Roberts later asked the states’ attorney, New York solicitor general Barbara Underwood, if she had any rebuttal to Katyal’s claim—if there was “any case where it has been as broad as it is here?” Her answer? “Well, of course it depends on what you call broad.”

Indeed.

But how much broader could it be? Taking the scientists at their word, we’d have to include at least every car owner, every coal power plant, every natural gas power plant, every cement producer, every forester, and the fabled effects of bovine flatulence. And not just every one of these in America, but every one in the world. The scope of this case and the numerous trade-offs involved make it utterly inappropriate for judicial resolution.

The supposed link between the power companies’ emissions and the alleged global warming harms resembles a Rube Goldberg device of conjectures that stretches back millions of years. In our brief we analogized this to the famous “butterfly effect”: a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and causes a tornado in Texas.

A few theories were offered as to why the case should not go any further. The most far reaching of these theories, the political question doctrine, is one we advanced in our amicus briefs. The political question doctrine directs courts to stay out of disputes that are better left to the other branches of government. A decision along those lines would go far in the future toward keeping such suits out of courts.

But many environmental lawyers are hoping, and predicting, that the states will “lose well”—that is, the suit will be dismissed because it has been “displaced” by the “regulatory cas­cade” underway at the EPA, not because it is a fundamentally impossible and illegitimate lawsuit. Dismissing the suit on these grounds would leave the door open for large-scale suits to be brought whenever an agency is thought to be shirking its regulatory duties. Such suits are already a problem for administrative agencies, particularly those brought by environmental advocacy groups trying to force agencies to live up to the groups’ idea of sound environmental policy. The NY Times, for example, reported recently on the “barrage [that] has paralyzed the listing process” for the Endangered Species Act.

Not wanting to totally foreclose the possibility of large-scale suits being brought in the future, at least three justices, Kagan, Breyer, and Ginsburg, seemed partial to the displacement theory. One hopes that the other five justices will rule, on either prudential standing or political question grounds, that no amount of regulatory action or inaction can make these suits justiciable. If regulation is called for here – a dubious proposition – it should be undertaken by the political branches, not the courts.

First, they came for the sex offenders. I am not a sex offender, but I opposed the civil commitment of sex offenders by the federal government because it is not an activity within the enumerated powers of Congress. The Supreme Court decided otherwise in Comstock, with the exception of Justices Thomas and Scalia.

Next, they will come for suspected terrorists. As Dahlia Lithwick (who I rarely agree with – here is her commentary on the Heller case) points out, the Supreme Court’s decision in Comstock may have some frightening implications for domestic preventive detention of terrorism suspects in lieu of criminal prosecution.

I saw this firsthand last summer when I attended a scholars meeting with the Obama administration’s Detention Policy Task Force (the same one that Andy McCarthy publicly refused to attend). I gave my views on where detention policy should go, as did a conference room full of experts on the laws of armed conflict and criminal justice (who shall remain anonymous, as this meeting was off the record). I was dismayed to hear a law professor from a prestigious university propose a system of preventive detention as the logical solution to countering terrorism. Worse yet, to make this law less provocative, the professor further proposed that preventive detention should be applied in other criminal contexts, so that the department of pre-crime would not be seen as unfairly targeting only enemy combatants overseas. This professor had taught many of the Department of Justice staffers in the room, and I looked around to see heads nodding at the suggestion.

I responded forcefully that such a system is antithetical to American traditions of due process. Battlefield detention is necessary to incapacitate insurgents and terrorists overseas, and is often employed in lieu of killing them. Broad powers of detention without trial in the criminal context do not make Guantanamo less controversial; they bring it on to our shores and in to our courtrooms. If we have enough information to show that someone is a threat by a preponderance of the evidence in order to detain them, we probably have enough to indict them for conspiracy. One of the reasons that few people turn to political violence in the United States is that the Bill of Rights bars the government from telling the citizenry how to worship, what to think, and what they can say. Generally speaking, you have to actually be a criminal to get charged as one.

Would the votes in Comstock translate into a Supreme Court ratification of such a system? Probably not, since Kennedy and Alito stressed in their concurrences that the circumstances in Comstock are unique. And Hamdi showed us that Scalia takes habeas corpus rights seriously when it comes to citizens. Unfortunately, only Stevens shared this view and he looks to be replaced by Elena Kagan, who argued that civil commitment in Comstock was an extension of Congress’ power to create and run a prison system (not an enumerated power). But this isn’t about counting the noses currently on the Court; it’s about creating a new normal where the people in prison are detainees, not defendants.

Unfortunately, there are more than a few people in favor of such a system. Jack Goldsmith and Neal Katyal (now the acting Solicitor General) propose a terrorism court. Sens. McCain and Lieberman want to treat all terrorism suspects as enemy combatants. Sens. Lieberman and Brown want to strip the citizenship of terrorism suspects and try them by military commission. Sens. Graham and McCain plan to close Guantanamo by creating a preventive detention court. Take a conservative plan to deal with enemy combatants captured on the other side of the world, strap on some liberal angst over tea parties and militia groups, and you’ve got a bipartisan plan for wholesale degradation of everyone’s liberties.

And when the proposal comes, the first thing they’ll say is that this is how we already deal with sex offenders.